ABSTRACT

Shame can hit different literary depths or strengths of intensity, and it can be ambivalent in differing ways. Shakespeare's great Sonnet 129 is a good example of this variability. This chapter argues that Sonnet 129 exhibits an intriguingly "modern" conception of shame as generalized, impersonal and reflexive. It also considers whether literary value can itself be assessed at least in part in terms of how well it captures the kind of "rational irrationality" that is presented in the sonnet. In the chapter, the heteronomy of shame is infra-individual rather than derived from clearly external social norms or social forces. This sort of shame, like most conceptions of guilt, is oriented introspectively towards the self, its gaze is internal, but unlike guilt it is, as it were, impersonal and even nonspecific, a matter seemingly of necessity or at least inevitability rather than choice.